“She disappeared fifteen years ago, at Mardi Gras,” he told Wallace. “That was when she met my father.”
Not until the words were out, hanging in the cool still air of the dusk, did Nothing realize his mistake.
“Then you are one of the unholy creatures too,” Wallace whispered. “The city has become riddled with them.” With a convulsive motion he tore the crucifix from his neck and thrust it at Nothing, trying to drive him toward the end of the alley. “Repent—while you are still young—in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, tear the bloodlust from your heart—”
Nothing could not bring himself to laugh. He caught Wallace’s hand and took the cross away. “I’m sorry, Grandfather,” he said. “That doesn’t work on all of us.”
“Then it’s lucky that the Lord told me to carry other protection,” said Wallace. In one jerky movement he whipped a small pistol from the waistband of his trousers and aimed it at Nothing’s forehead.
“Bless you, my grandson,” he said. “When you look upon the face of God, you will thank me.”
Nothing was never sure how long he stood there staring down the round black barrel of the gun, wondering whether he would see the flash of fire or hear the explosion before the bullet smashed into his face. The brain or the heart, Christian had told him. He had time to think of all he had found, all he was about to lose, all the miles he would not travel.
A mist seemed to surround Wallace’s head, suffusing his face with dim light. Nothing saw Wallace’s finger tightening on the trigger: actually saw that.
Then something was plummeting toward them. Nothing saw the large dark shape hit Wallace dead-on, saw Wallace’s body jerk forward and his arm fly up. The shot went wild. Brick splintered far overhead.
Zillah crouched atop Wallace’s prone form. He must have launched himself from the second-story window, but he was not even breathing hard. The other man’s body had stopped his fall.
Wallace lay on the pavement in the shards of glass. He groped weakly for the pistol. Zillah stamped on Wallace’s hand, and Nothing heard a sound like strands of raw spaghetti breaking. Wallace screamed once, a shrill, despairing sound. Then he began to mumble softly. Nothing realized he was praying. Did he still think his God was going to pull him out of this one?
“Some fine messes you get yourself into,” said Zillah. “What if I hadn’t seen you from up there?” His eyes gleamed; his lips were purple with fury. “You little fool”—the pointed tip of his shoe met Wallace’s cheekbone; black blood sprayed—“do you think you’re too smart to die? Do you think I can always watch out for you?”
Zillah knelt above Wallace, pulled Wallace’s head up by a handful of bloodied gray hair, and smashed Wallace’s face into the pavement. The sound made Nothing think of eggs being dropped onto broken glass. Gore began to pool beneath Wallace’s head. “I won’t lose you now, Nothing.” Zillah rolled Wallace over and began to slap him across the face, over and over, glaring up at Nothing. “Don’t you know”—slap—“I love you?” Slap. “I LOVE YOU.” Slap.
Zillah’s long nails dug into the loose flesh of Wallace’s face. He wrenched Wallace’s head back, exposing his throat. Incredibly, Wallace was still praying: “…the flesh of the Son,” Nothing heard him mumble.
For a moment Zillah seemed ready to sink his fingernails into the old man’s throat. But he only ground Wallace’s face down again, then leaped off him and came for Nothing. He grabbed Nothing by the front of his coat, nearly choking him. With his other hand he cupped Nothing’s chin. The gesture was almost tender, except that Zillah dug his long nails into the flesh of Nothing’s cheeks. Zillah was hurting him on purpose. Nothing felt a clear, icy fury begin to rise within him.
“Get your hands off me,” he said.
Zillah’s eyes flared brighter. “What?”
“I said get them off me.” Nothing shoved Zillah’s hand away from his face and twisted out of Zillah’s grasp. They faced each other in the darkening alley. Nothing’s heart beat painfully fast, but he was pleased to realize he wasn’t trembling. “I’m sorry I get myself into stupid messes, okay? I haven’t been doing this very long. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. Nobody except Christian ever tells me anything.” With each word he grew angrier. “You don’t treat me like your son—you treat me like I’m half sex slave and half lapdog. When I’m good, you pat me on the head, and when I fuck up you yell at me and hurt me. But you never explain anything to me. What kind of a father are you, anyway?”
Nothing gasped for breath. He could see only two bright green spots on the darkness. “All I have to say is this,” he continued. “Don’t ever hurt me again. I love you. I want to stay with you. But don’t you hurt me. I’m not Molochai or Twig. I won’t take it. I’m sick of it.”
Zillah stared at him. Slowly the blaze in his eyes died down; they became cool, appraising. “Wait here,” he said.
Then Zillah did an odd thing. He knelt beside Wallace again and yanked Wallace’s trouser legs up past his ankles. When Zillah reached into the purple silk lining of his jacket, Nothing knew what he was going to do. He wanted to look away; instead, he watched helplessly as Zillah unfolded his pearl-handled razor and carefully sliced through the back of each ankle. He drew the blade through the old man’s threadbare socks, through the thin skin, through the big tendon as if it were butter. Nothing saw the razor falter as it grated on bone. Wallace was now beyond sound; only a long shudder ran through his body.
“Wait here,” Zillah said again. Nothing half-expected him to skitter up the brick wall and climb back through the window. But Zillah just walked to the mouth of the alley, glanced over his shoulder at Nothing, and turned toward the staircase that led up to the room.
Nothing could not look at Wallace now. He stared at the ground, at the broken glass and the pile of garbage. Something gleamed near his foot. The crucifix. Nothing looked at it for a long moment, then picked it up and thrust it deep into his pocket. Zillah wouldn’t like him keeping it.
Too bad.
In a few minutes Zillah came back down with Molochai and Twig. They had left Christian sleeping, they said. They could tell him about Wallace later. It would be a surprise. Nothing suspected they were just greedy.
Wallace was already bleeding from several places. The wounds in his ankles pumped with his heartbeat. Molochai and Twig latched onto them. Nothing imagined that the big veins of the legs must be like soda straws.
Zillah picked up one of Wallace’s limp hands, the one he had stomped. The palm was smeared with blood where it had been crushed against the broken glass and rough brick. Zillah opened his razor again. He slid it smoothly in, and the flesh of the palm parted cleanly. A sheet of thin blood mixed with saliva ran down Zillah’s chin as he began to suck at the wound.
Nothing’s stomach growled.
He crawled forward and knelt beside Wallace. His grandfather’s cheek rested on a broken bottle. His eyes were open, still aware, brimming with rage and pain. At least I can end the pain for you, Nothing thought. He put his mouth against the slow pulse of Wallace’s throat. The skin there was dry and soft; it felt very old. He choked back a sob and sank in his new filed teeth.
His grandfather’s blood was bitter.
But he and his family drank every drop.
28
Late that night Ghost opened his eyes and blinked up at an unfamiliar ceiling. There were no dead leaves up there, no painted stars. There were only shifting patches of moonlight like a white and silver sea.
For a moment he felt the floating giddiness that always came when he woke in a strange bed. Then, slowly, the world fell into place around him. There was the softness of a mattress under his back, the weight of blankets. There was the deep regular breathing of Steve beside him, and the warmth of Steve’s skin, and Steve’s smell that had gone strange in the past couple of days. It made Ghost wonder whether Steve’s insides had been thrown off balance somehow.
Steve usually smelled of beer, but now, often as not, the harsh odor o
f whiskey was on him instead. And dirty hair, but that was normal because Steve’s hair was getting long and he said it was a royal pain in the ass to wash. But now Steve’s clothes were dirty too, and there was some strange secret smell that made Ghost lift his head and flare his nostrils, trying to scent it out, to pin it down. It was the smell of exhaustion, the smell of frying brains, the smell of despair. It might mean that Steve was only clinging to some remote edge of sanity. It might mean Steve was about ready to say Fuck this shit, man, and give up altogether. Steve still loved Ann, but it was a wretched kind of love, a love that made him hate himself for feeling it. Steve was just blaming himself now. He had reason to blame himself.
But Ghost knew guilt could be traced back forever, blame could be laid every which way, and what good would it do? Whose pain would be lessened by it? Steve had done what he had done, and because he was Steve, he could not have done it any other way.
Steve had always been like that: he would go through the fire, would never shy away no matter how hellish it was. When the pain burned off him, he seemed stronger, more pure. But sometimes it nearly killed him. And sometimes he tried to quench it by drinking, which only made the flames burn higher and hotter.
Why couldn’t Ann understand how Steve was? The rocker with a hundred midnights stored in his heart for nobody to find; sure, he was tough, but he did hurt, and somehow you had to soothe that pain while pretending you couldn’t see it. Ghost stared into the dark. Sometimes he thought he was the only person who understood Steve at all. They had been together so long. But what good did that do Steve?
He remembered what Ann had said the day he went over to her house. The night is the hardest time to be alive, she had told him. And four a.m. knows all my secrets. She had wanted something, or someone, to get her through the night.
Zillah with his green eyes had gotten her through part of one night, anyway. But what saved her from four a.m. now? What had she thought about on those nights when she prowled around the trailer on Violin Road, maybe knocking and not being let in, maybe afraid even to knock? What was she thinking now, as she rode a southbound bus, as she roamed the dark streets of the French Quarter, breathing the mist of beer and the essence of time? Did she know yet where Zillah lived; was she staring up at his window, whispering words he would not hear?
What was getting her through this night? And what would get her through all the nights yet to come, as the poison fetus grew inside her?
Ghost sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He caught a whiff of himself. His clothes were as dirty as Steve’s, though not as beer-stained; they had only the things they’d been wearing when they took off for New Orleans. Tomorrow they would have to go and buy a couple of fresh T-shirts. Something classy, like the oyster bar shirts that said SHUCK ME, SUCK ME, EAT ME RAW.
The wooden floor was cold. Moonlight dappled Ghost’s feet. He stood up slowly, easing his weight off the mattress, trying not to wake Steve. There wasn’t much chance of Steve waking up, though. Earlier tonight Steve had declared his intention to drink a pitcher of Dixie beer in every bar on Bourbon Street. When they didn’t have Dixie, he settled for Bud. As far as Ghost could recall, they had gotten about halfway before he was able to drag Steve back to the room and dump him into bed.
Ghost had had his share of those pitchers too. He was still swaying a little. He steadied himself against the doorjamb and crossed the threshold into the hall.
He and Steve had the first room at the top of the stairs. Next to that was the room belonging to Arkady’s mysterious guests; beyond that was the bathroom, where Ghost was headed, and at the end of the hall was Arkady’s bedroom.
As Ghost passed the open door of the second room, he saw moonlight filtering in through a dirty window. The cold glow spilled over the rumpled sheets and blankets on the bed, made the floorboards gleam, threw the closet door into shadow so that Ghost couldn’t tell whether it was open or shut. At the foot of the bed, drooping halfway to the floor, a small twisted shape hung.
Ghost’s breath caught in his throat. As he stared at the shape, it seemed to twitch. Ghost took two quick steps backward. Were the occupants of this room really the ones who had killed Ashley? Could Arkady be that perverse? Was the twisted shape another of their victims, a child with all the life sucked out of it, hanging bonelessly? Or was it some voodoo creation of Arkady’s, some dried effigy that would come to life and jerk toward him in a horrible parody of dance?
Ghost stood in the doorway a moment longer, pulling his hair over his face, staring through its pale curtain into the room. He didn’t want to know what the shape was. He wanted to pull the door shut, go on down the hall to the bathroom, and get back to bed. With Steve asleep beside him, he would not be afraid.
But he had to know what was going on here, whether this was a safe place or not. Before he could think about it any more, he made himself walk to the foot of the bed and prod the shape with one finger.
A pillow, wadded into a hard little knot. That was all it was. For a second he was glad Steve was in the other room passed out, not here to see him getting spooked over a pillow. Then he wished Steve were here, even though he knew Steve would call him a pussy. Steve hadn’t been laughing at much of anything these days. Even tonight. Usually when they went on a real bender, they would start remembering stuff they had done when they were kids, making stupid jokes, imitating each other. “Fuckin’ shit, Steve, you sure are sucking down that fuckin’ brew,” Ghost would say, and Steve would reply imperturbably, “Yeah, but I can feel the spirit of the beer inside me.”
But tonight Steve had swilled his beer silently, staring into its golden depths, at the mirror behind the bar, at the colored lights out on Bourbon Street. When he met Ghost’s eyes, he would not hold the gaze. But before Steve looked away, Ghost had seen stark terror in his eyes.
Ghost picked up the pillow and smoothed it out. As he was about to toss it back onto the bed, he saw the strands of hair clinging to the linen. He picked a few of them off—they were brittle, translucent—and held them up to the moonlight, trying to see their color. Some of the strands were clear ruby-red. Some were bright bleachy yellow. Neither color looked natural.
Over to his right, the closet door creaked and swung halfway open.
Ghost looked at it, his head lifted high, his nostrils flaring a little. The door was tauntingly still, trying to pretend it had been halfway open all the time. Trying to pretend a sudden gust from nowhere had swept through the room. Trying to pretend the floor wasn’t level and it had just happened to swing open while Ghost was standing there alone in the middle of the night.
Ghost wasn’t fooled. He moved toward the closet and put his hand on the knob. When no one twisted it from the other side, he yanked the door wide open.
For one terrible second he thought something was drifting toward him, some bright many-armed wraith. Then he saw that the closet was haunted only by clothes, strange, beautiful clothes of colored silk. Were they dresses? Shirts? Ghost took a sea-green sleeve between his thumb and his forefinger, rubbing the slippery sensuous cloth, wondering. Loose hangers kissed softly against each other.
Who wore these rich clothes? He pulled a swath of rose-colored silk toward him and buried his nose in its cool depths. The cloth was saturated with the smells of strawberry incense, of clove cigarettes, of wine, of tangy sweat.
The smells drew him in.
And as he breathed the heady mélange, a voice whispered to him from the depths of the closet: “Ghost… easy …”
He was never sure how he got out of the room and made a wrong turn down the hall. Maybe he meant to go racing back to his room; maybe he meant to lock himself in the bathroom and stay there all night. He never meant to barge into Arkady’s bedroom—that much was certain. But all at once there he was, and there was Arkady burning a candle on his nightstand, playing with several little heaps of colored powder on a white plate, pushing them into intricate convoluted patterns of arrows, curlicues, lines, and crosses.
&
nbsp; When Ghost slammed into the room and leaned panting against the door, Arkady looked up and smiled. All the colored powders fell back in a bright spray across the plate. “What a lovely surprise,” said Arkady. “Well. Not precisely a surprise, since I heard you coming down the hall. But I am ever so pleased to see you nonetheless.”
First, Arkady made Ghost swallow a tranquilizing powder. Ghost didn’t want it, but in the end it was easy to make him swallow it: Arkady just slipped inside Ghost’s mind and pushed. Usually he would not have tried such a thing on a sensitive as powerful as Ghost, but the boy was terrified and exhausted. It was easy.
Then he made Ghost tell his tale: the whole thing, vampires and all. It was more convoluted and full of pain than Arkady could have guessed. Ghost’s hands twitched all the way through the telling; he tugged his pale hair over his eyes, and more than once Arkady heard a sob catch in his throat.
At last Ghost fell silent. He tried to remain sitting, but his head kept drooping and his eyes threatened to slip shut. Arkady saw Ghost’s hands clenching into loose fists: the poor boy was trying to will himself to stay awake.
With a light finger Arkady touched Ghost’s lips, those lovely lips so pale, so delicately lined, tucked in at the corners with worry and fear. Under his touch he felt Ghost’s lips tighten. Ghost was exhausted, nearly asleep; most likely he did not know who touched him. Nevertheless, Arkady imagined how it would be to slide his finger between those lips, to stroke the pink rag of a tongue, to be surrounded by the wet warmth of Ghost’s mouth. He wondered how it would be to taste Ghost’s sweet spit. Poor boy, he thought again. Poor lost boys, both of them. One trying to drown his fear in a bottle, and the other—this beautiful child—trying to confront it all alone.
“Poor boy,” murmured Arkady. “You are very brave, Ghost. Dreadfully, achingly brave.” He stroked the smooth curve of Ghost’s throat, feeling the flesh shudder beneath his touch, then let his fingers stray between the neckband of the voluminous tie-dyed shirt Ghost wore. When Ghost had come slamming into the room, Arkady’s heart melted for the child standing there trembling in that enormous shirt that made him look so terribly young. He had wanted to hold out his arms to Ghost….
Lost Souls Page 29